Australia

Australia: Youngest Son, Brisbane and The Glasshouse Mountains

/ fgrtommo / 2 Comments

Our Youngest Son (YS) has been in Australia for almost 18 months now. This is Long Suffering Wife’s (LSW) and my first trip to Australia. It was great to see him and his lovely Northern Irish girlfriend for the first time since he left.

His lifestyle here seems tremendous. Brisbane is up and coming and has some edgy bits. He has forged a new, interesting and apparently thriving cinematography business here (Cactus Juice Cinematography). He has great friends and a car to enable trips to the amazing countryside and coast.

YS and his girlfriend have shown us around West End where they live, introduced us to the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art and guided us to using the river boats to see other hip parts of Brisbane.

Example Local Art at Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art

Also they drove us out to see sunrise from the Glasshouse Mountains. The jet lag meant the very early start was no problem for LSW or I – although there is embarrassing footage of us snoozing in the back of the car on the way back!

In any case the trip was fabulous. The sunrise was great. The ancient volcanic plugs that make up the mountains are spectacular but also, in the case of Ngungun, accessible through a 30 minute, energetic climb. The views all around were spectacular.

Sunrise View Climbing Ngungun, Glasshouse Mountains

View from Ngungun at Sunrise

 

YS and girlfriend were able to scare us on the way down with warnings of animals called ‘drop bears’ that fall onto the unsuspecting shoulders of tourists. This is fiction of course, but we were taken in for a few seconds. Pommie tricking is sport!

Sunrise Over the Sunshine Coast from Ngungun

 

We did much more on the trip, including our first of many visits to a pristine, seemingly endless beaches of perfect sand and surf, and my first açai bowl breakfast.  Great fun and more to come…

Australia – We Are Coming!

/ fgrtommo / 3 Comments

One month into retirement and it’s generally been an unremarkable week as I have rested my dodgy knee.

However, we have had news from Australia from our Youngest Son (YS) that his application for a visa extension has been granted. He will be staying down under for at least another year. That new certainty has allowed Long Suffering Wife (LSW) and I to book a holiday there during which we will be able to see him (and his girlfriend, who is the one actually doing the job Australia needs) in his new found paradise.

What is great of course is that we can go for longer than would have been the case had I not been retired. We still have to fit the holiday around LSW’s part time work commitments but we will have almost all of October to skip through Singapore and Hong Kong and spend time around Brisbane and Melbourne.

We have friends and relatives in Singapore, and YS has been based in Brisbane for over a year now, so we are going to be well guided there. However, any ideas for ‘must-do’ things in Hong Kong and Melbourne would be welcome.

The only down-side is that I will miss several Forest Green Rovers games while I’m away. The build up to our first season in the Football League proper has been impressive. The sustainability and green agenda espoused by the Chairman, allied to the fact that the club represents the smallest settlement in the country, has attracted a lot of media interest (for example: The Guardian: Forest Green Rovers in League 2 and slots on Sky, ESPN and even Al Jazeera TV.

Last season’s playoff win at Wembley was so emotional but tomorrow we will find out if the team are likely to back up the recent hype with quality performances on the pitch in League 2! Of course there is trepidation about what the new season might bring. We could win or lose our first game 4-0 – there are just no benchmarks yet. Either way, the build-up is tense and exciting. I can barely wait!

Victory at Wembley 2017

Victory at Wembley 2017